Required reading has never been so hot. Once upon a time there was a Brooklyn hipster named Norah. Unlucky in love, and short on extracurriculars for her college apps, Norah decided to start a book group. She knew the perfect locale -- a local indie bookstore with a crush-worthy cutie manning the soy latte counter. When the first meeting arrives, Norah gets a page-turning surprise. The attendees may be bookish, but there are also a few hotties! Most noteworthy: sweet, literary James. He's like a modern Jane Austen hero.... Only, how to snag him? Ever the romantic heroine, Norah devises a secret plan. And if it works, Norah may just find her "Happily Ever After" love story. The End.

Behind the veil of tourism, New Orleans drips with hunger, sorcery, and secrets. One of those is Honey Island Swamp, a powerful nexus of magic outside the city limits. Its blue-green water can make you ageless and manifest carnivals out of thin air. Similar to the River Styx, it serves as the gateway between the realms of the living, dead, and in-between. And because of this power, it becomes both a haven and a battlefield for witches, humans, and other magical beings.

"It's 1999, and Samantha has danced for years at the Lovely Lady strip club. She's not used to taking anyone under her wing - after all, between her disapproving boyfriend and his daughter, who may as well be her own child, she has enough to worry about. But when Samantha overrides her better judgment to drive a new dancer home, they are run off the road. The police arrive at the scene of the accident - but find only one body. Georgia, another dancer, is drawn into the investigation as she tries to assist Holly, a Harvard-educated detective with a complicated story of her own. As the point of view shifts from dancers and detectives to club patrons and children, the women round up a list of suspects, all the while grappling with their understandings of loss and love. Drawing on her personal experiences as well as interviews with police, Rutkoski immerses us in a subculture that is all too often reduced to cliché. Gripping, deeply feminist, and character-driven, Real Easy spellbinds us and gets to the heart of this timeless question: How do women live out their lives knowing that men can hurt them?"--Publisher.

A Novel Idea is a memoir in photoessay form that follows Fiona McGregor's life as shewrites her award-winning novel Indelible Ink. It is a tongue-in-cheekrumination on the monotony and loneliness of the novelist's daily life, and theact of endurance the writer must perform. Through an extendedsequence of photographs taken on a hand-me-down camera, accompanied by terse,evocative captions, the book spans several years of labour andprocrastination, elation and despair. The details of the outside worldintrude as McGregor works on the novel alone in her Bondi flat, with nothingbut a desk, a pin-board, a laptop and a cat, and in studio spaces in Berlin and Estonia. McGregor's voice iswry, vulnerable, at times caustic, capturing the colloquial qualities of herfiction and the durational nature of her performance art via the ephemeral andessential thoughts that take up an author's days, weeks, and years.

Each of the sixty reproducible classroom-ready activities has general guidelines that describe the purposes for the project, how to use it, evaluation points, and variations that increase student participation and motivation, and a variety of assessment activities. Designed around the new IRA/NCTE Standards, (reading, writing, representing, viewing, speaking, and listening) these stimulating activities applicable to a variety of novels create opportunities for students to develop their skills as readers, writers, and speakers. Three sections center on reading and writing activity projects (e.g., essays, news stories, letters), visual display projects (e.g., charts, posters, bookmarks), and speaking and listening activities.

This concise yet comprehensive study explores innovative practice in the novel and, from the perspective of creative writing, the astonishing resilience of the novel form. It offers a practical guide to the many possibilities available to the writer of the novel, with each chapter offering exercises to encourage innovation and to expand the creative writer's narrative skills. Beginning with early iterations of the novel in the 17th century, this book follows the evocation of innovation in the novel through Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism and into today's dizzying array of digital and interactive possibilities. While guiding the reader through the possibilities available (in both genre and literary fiction), this book encourages both aspiring and established writers to produce novels with imagination, playfulness and gravitas. Dynamic and interactive, this text is distinctive in offering a grounding in the literary history of the novel, while also equipping readers to write in the form themselves. It is an essential resource for any student of creative writing, or anyone with an interest in writing their own novel.